


You do but go home again

by ophelietta



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Gen, I mean... the Black Death, that's the only tag you really need
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26183161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta
Summary: “Is that Kivrin?” the crackling voice asks again. It’s the tech asking, over the intercom. He is looking at her as if she has fallen from the sky.~Kivrin comes back. It's not quite the same thing as coming home.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	You do but go home again

_You from the Polack wars, and you from England,_

_Are here arrived, give order that these bodies_

_High on a stage be placed to the view;_

_And let me speak to the yet unknowing world_

_How these things came about._

__

\- _Hamlet,_ W.S. 

~

“Is that Kivrin?” a crackling voice asks.

The last sparkling condensation of the net fades, but Kivrin still finds herself blinking, haloes dancing in her eyes.

The boy in the brown burlap smock tears away from them. Mr. Dunworthy’s weight falls heavily against her side, and she finds herself holding him as he doubles over, racked with coughs.

_Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast befallen us._

“We need medical!” the boy shouts, pounding at a door. “Mr. Dunworthy’s had a relapse!”

Across a thin-glass partition, a tech is sitting in a wheelchair, his hands frozen over a console. His skin is dark but his hair is yellowy-white like hay, and he is staring at her. 

A door slides open, and a woman steps in. Her face is covered by a plastic shield and visor, and a yellow tissue paper gown flows over her body, as if she is a girl in a gauzy dress, dancing in a lake. There are blue gloves on her hands, blue booties on her feet. 

“Is that Kivrin?” the crackling voice asks again. It’s the tech asking, over the intercom. He is looking at her as if she has fallen from the sky.

~

The paramedics, all of them in blue and yellow SPGs, strap Mr. Dunworthy down to a stretcher, and hook a blue-green oxygen mask to his face. His breath escapes from the side of the mask in cold white tumbles of smoke.

They let Kivrin and the boy in the smock stay with Mr. Dunworthy, while the tech has to be wheeled into a separate ambulance. The boy seems torn between worry over Mr. Dunworthy and excitement over riding in an ambulance.

“Isn’t it _apocalyptic_?” the boy asks Kivrin. His cheeks are rough-red with cold, and there’s still snow from the clearing, from the drop, melting in his dark blonde hair. “Even during quarantine, I never got to ride in an ambulance. Great-aunt Mary would’ve had _kittens_ -“

The ambulance jumps and jolts through the city streets, wilder than Gringolet with his silver-chased bridle, wilder than Balaam who balked but then calmed under Father Roche’s gentle hands. Kivrin clutches at a red plastic handle hanging overhead, breathes shallowly through her broken ribs, and tries to concentrate on the boy instead.

“What is your name?” she asks the boy, but it comes out, “ _How are youe cleped_?”

~

In the Infirmary, they cut the clothing off of her, the smock and the leather hose thick with Father Roche’s blood and vomit. Kivrin wants to stop them, to say, “They have the blood of a saint upon them,” but the clothes are already disappearing into a bag for hazardous materials, destined for the incinerator.

And then a nurse is ushering her to - a shower. It has white tiles all over and a gleaming silver showerhead and the light that falls upon it is blindingly bright, after the constant dimness of midwinter clouds, after tallow and beeswax candles in a darkened church.

She stands there, in front of the hospital shower, clothed in blood and dirt, sweat and old wine, vomit and pus, tears and snow. 

“Do you need assistance?” the nurse asks. 

“No,” Kivrin says. She reaches out to stroke the silver faucet, as if it’s an animal that may strike her, and hot water - the miracle of it, clean, hot water, untainted - pours out, and falls over one outstretched hand, a benediction. “I’ll be all right.”

~

She emerges, new and pink-skinned. She scrubs and scrubs with the pale liquid in the dispenser, but there is still dirt encrusted under her fingernails and toenails that won’t come out. Her hair feels strange, clean and short and ragged, drying and so light, like it might just float away.

They give her clothes: papery slippers, a hospital gown, deep blue like woad. Her fingers are clumsy with the ties. Agnes had complained that the ribbon around her wrist was tied too tight, and Kivrin made Agnes hold her bell so it wouldn’t ring during Christmas mass, its tiny chime cupped in her hand.

Kivrin climbs into the hospital bed, gingerly laying on her left side to ease some of the pressure in her ribs. The hospital bed feels softer than anything she’s ever slept in before, and she’s half-afraid that she’ll sink right through it.

They’ve left a thin blanket for her, but it’s warm as if it’s been in an oven. There are no burned or blackened spots on it, from sparks flying out of a fire, like the woven blanket she remembers dragging over Agnes, only to have her kick it off.

Kivrin and Father Roche had built a barricade of tables in the main hall, and Agnes had tried to climb over them, to reach Kivrin. “Tell Kivrin to come and get me!” she had screamed, red-faced with tantrum and eaten up by fever. Kivrin was in front of her, but Agnes had been unseeing. “I do not like it here!”

“Agnes is dead,” Kivrin whispers into the darkness of the hospital room, to hear how it sounds. “She has been dead for 734 years.”

But that’s not true. Agnes died only a few weeks ago, the day after New Year’s, after Lady Imeyne and before Eliwys. Kivrin had washed her tiny body, and they had buried her with her bell, its tiny chime cupped in her hand.

~

Kivrin sleeps.

~

When she wakes up, she is still in 2054.

The boy - his name, she learned, is Colin - is sitting perched in a chair by her bed. He’s in a hospital gown too, as well as a lumpy, navy-blue jumper. He’s reading a large book with a red cover, his lips moving silently. 

When she stirs, he crows, "You're up!" with obvious relief. " _Finally_. Dunworthy’s still asleep, and the ward sister said she’d skin me alive if I tried to sneak out of the isolation ward, so I couldn’t even visit Badri or run messages or _anything_.”

Kivrin grasps onto one of the few pieces that floats up from the stream of Colin’s chatter. “Badri?”

“Yeah, Dunworthy’s tech. He opened the net for us yesyerday - don’t you remember? The ward sister gave me a dressing down about him too, saying he’d already had a relapse once and were we trying to kill all her patients, and when I said _no_ , the exact _opposite_ , really, we were on an incredibly important _rescue mission_ \- ”

The man with the dark skin and the yellowy-white hair, the tech who asked, “Is that Kivrin?” But Badri was only a few years older than her. He was a grad student at Balliol. She tried to remember the colour of his hair from that morning when she lay in the prep room in the laboratory, her arm flung over her face, but all she can remember is that Badri had been the only one not trying to give her orders.

“What happened?” Kivrin asks.

~

Colin tells her.

Bits and pieces come back, the story he’d told as they had trudged towards the drop, in the darkness, through the snow. How he jumped through the barricade to enter the quarantine zone, how he ran errands and took messages during the epidemic, how Mr. Dunworthy was _his_ responsibility, how his Christmas presents from his mother came late in the post, how Great-aunt Mary - how Dr. Aherns -

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Kivrin says, softly.

Dr. Aherns had given Kivrin her T-cell enhancement and inoculations and antivirals, had taught her about herbal medicine and scrofula and cholera and typhus and the plague. She had patted Kivrin on the arm and said, “Don’t let anyone bleed you or leech you or give you mercury poisoning, and you’ll do very well.”

Colin falls quiet, for once. “I liked Great-aunt Mary,” he says, finally. “She was a good sort.”

~

A nurse brings in a package for Kivrin. “From your flatmate,” the nurse says, checking on Kivrin’s vitals and stats. “She dropped it off at the front desk, said she’ll see you as soon as you’re allowed visitors.”

In the white paper bag, Kivrin finds warm winter clothes: a wine-coloured sweater, soft dark grey sweatpants, woollen socks, underwear. There’s an orange package of dark chocolate Hobnobs from the stash Kivrin keeps in the kitchen, above the fridge. There’s a little portable console, the charger cable wrapped up with a red hair tie, and a Post It note that says, in Anjali’s looping writing, _Welcome back!_

~

Colin asks her, “What was it like?”

So she tells him, her hands folded as if in prayer, and continues to fill the corder.

She knows that she’ll forget, with time. That’s just the way the human mind works. The most powerful impressions will stay, and the little things will fade: the exact yellow-white of Eliwys’ coif, the size of the red-green apple that fell from Rosemund’s hand.

She has to record it. If if she doesn’t get it down, if she doesn’t share what she has seen, then there will have been no point to any of it. To the effort it took to get her there, the effort it took to survive. The effort it took to bring her back, and the effort it takes to be here now, to continue to be here now. To breathe through her broken ribs. The effort it takes, to just breathe.

~

On her third day in the Infirmary, Mr. Dunworthy wakes up and asks to see her.

He’s sitting up in a nest of pillows - probably every pillow that Colin could beg, borrow, or steal from under the ward sister’s wrathful eye. Like Badri, Mr. Dunworthy looks paler and frailer and older, and there are centuries sunk into his eyes. But at least he’s wearing his spectacles rather than an oxygen mask, and he's wrapped in a rusty green cardigan with amber-brown elbow patches that Kivrin remembers him wearing a lifetime ago.

At first Mr. Dunworthy tries to smile, but Kivrin spends too long to trying to figure out how to make her face do the same, so he lets the smile fade.

And he asks, “Will you ever forgive me?”

Kivrin stares at him blankly. “I’m sorry?”

His eyes drop to his hands, held open in his lap. There are still marks on his palms from where he’d clutched Gringolet’s reins.

“I infected Badri with my worry,” Mr. Dunworthy says, “to the point where he refed the coordinates. I didn’t abort the drop as soon as I realized something was wrong. I should’ve sent you right back to Latimer when you were in your first year, when you asked me for help. I never should’ve encouraged you in the first place-“

“Mr. Dunworthy.” Kivrin reaches out, but then pauses. He had streptomycin, Colin had said, he couldn’t get the plague, but it still feels strange and vulnerable to reach out and touch the back of one of Mr. Dunworthy’s thin hands. He looks up at her, and his spectacles have fogged up because of the tears in his eyes.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she says. “You did nothing but help me. I wanted to go to the Middle Ages, more than anything in the world-” and she feels a strange breathhiccup in her throat, almost like a sob. “I would’ve gone either way. At least because of you, and Dr. Aherns, and the interpreter, I had a fighting chance. And you came back and got me - even though you were sick, even though you had no idea if I was alive or dead. You came back for me.”

She bows her head, feeling, all of a sudden, terribly tired. 

“It wasn’t your fault," she continues, "that so many things went so terribly wrong. You prepared me the best that you could, with everything you knew. There was just - so much that you didn’t know, that I didn’t know. That nobody knew, or could have known.” The sob rises in her throat again, threatening to choke her. “We were all such innocents, then.”

~

Colin visits her again, and offers her a sweet that looks like a soap tablet. “It’s turned your tongue green,” he says, gleeful, and all she can think of is how Lady Imeyne complained that there was no sugar for subtlety or sweetmeats. She gives Colin a chocolate Hobknob in return, and he spills crumbs all over the front of his navy jumper.

“It was _brutal_ when the detainees were all crammed in at Balliol,” he says, through a mouthful of biscuit. “We were down to this awful gluey oatmeal and Dunworthy’s man, Finch, kept glaring at me every time I took even a _smidgeon_ of marmalade.”

“You should record all of that,” Kivrin says, thoughtful. “If you want to be a historian. Get it on a corder, or type it on a console. Write down everything that you remember from the epidemic and the quarantine. What people said and what they wore, what you ate and what you did, anything you can think of. One day, there will be people who will want to know what it was like to live through this time.”

~

Mr. Dunworthy tells her that it isn’t just Dr. Aherns that’s died.

Mr. Latimer died. She never did get to tell him about the adjectival inflections.

Mr. Gilchrist died, though she was sure he had taken every possible precaution.

There was a 19% mortality rate for H292, Mr. Dunworthy said, before they got the analogue and distributed the vaccine.

The Black Death had killed one-third to one-half of Europe. A 19% mortality rate was a blessing of the modern age, in comparison.

None of this feels like a blessing.

“There is nothing to fear,” Father Roche had said. “You do but go home again.”

~

“You’ll be as revered as a saint, you know,” Mr. Dunworthy says, almost casually. He’s stabbing at his bowl of rice pudding with his free hand, the one that isn’t hooked up to an IV drip.

“I’m sorry?” Kivrin says, breaking off from where she’d been peering at Colin’s pocket vidder over his shoulder, where he’s shooting aliens with unnerving speed and accuracy.

“You,” Mr. Dunworthy says, pointing his pudding spoon at her. “You’re the only living historian who’s ever gone to the Middle Ages, _ever_ , and you’ve come back with a firsthand account of the Black Death. You could pack up from Oxford if you like, and live off honorariums from lecturing all over the world. You could have your pick of graduate programs -they’ll be eager to lure you in with funding and scholarships.” 

The world shimmers and fractures around her, her thoughts tumbling:

She buried a six-month-old baby.

She hadn’t saved a single person in the village. They all died. Every one of them.

She couldn’t bury Father Roche, because her wooden spade broke in the frozen ground.

She forgot to tell Agnes where Blackie was buried.

She never did get to milk the cow, which was probably still wandering around Skendgate, its udders full to bursting.

“That,” she says, tries to say, but her throat is hoarse and dry, her voice crackling like old leaves, like Badri’s over the intercom. Her hands have curled up into fists, on her thighs. “That’s not what any of it was about.”

“No,” Mr. Dunworthy says, quiet now, his eyes very kind. “I know. Just thinking out loud, of the things people will say to you now.” 

~

There are so many stories of people being punished for looking back at what they have lost. Lot’s Wife, looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah burning, turned to a pillar of salt. Orpheus turning back to hear Eurydice’s song, and losing his wife all over again. 

Kivrin knows that she will spend the rest of her life looking back at what she has lost.

That’s the job of a historian.

~

She sets up her little portable console, fumbling with the controls. The first call she receives is from Badri, the tech from Balliol. She’d talked to him once, maybe twice, before the drop. He had left her a note at Montoya’s dig, that they were excavating the knight’s tomb. He’d always struck her as careful and competent and kind.

“Is that Kivrin?” Badri asks, even though he’s the one who called her.

“It’s Kivrin,” she says. “I’m back.”

He starts to cry. 


End file.
